My TV can record to USB-storage, which is quite common. What I would like was to record to my NAS instead, where there's plenty of room and recordings can be shared and managed better. So I'm looking for an adapter-thingy (hw/sw) that will make my NAS appear to the TV as a USB block storage device. Any ideas? Googling has turned up nothing.

Please note that this is the exact opposite of the very common scenario of making a USB device available as a networked drive. There are tons of solutions for that, so let me stress that I'm looking for the opposite: make my NAS appear as a physical USB drive that can plug straight into my TV, like so:

@harrymc I thought it was pretty clear that both I and the OP don't want to constantly, manually shuffle files across from one storage device to another. But if you know of a USB stick that can access an SMB share while providing access to it via the USB, post that as an answer.
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detlyFeb 18 at 21:50

3 Answers
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I looked a bit further and the "Infinite USB Memory"-stick from Infinitec claims to do just this. Unfortunately it gets a pretty bad review from Engadget where it was reviewed yesterday (what an incredible coincidence, as I've been thinking about this for quite some time!). But while this particular product may not work very well it does actually offer the exact functionality I was looking for.

If your NAS is a Linux-based PC, maybe, just maybe you might, with a lot of work, get something like this PCI USB 2.0 Peripheral Controller to work. This PCI card adds a "peripheral side" USB port to your system, NOT a "host side" port. So the possibility is to turn your entire PC into a USB device connectible to another PC. I know Linux has support for "USB Gadgets" - with the proper programs running it would certainly seem possible.

If your NAS can expose Samba shares, you might be able to do something with a rooted Android phone. On my Droid, the SD card appears internally as /mnt/sdcard. Running Samba on it is certainly possible. I've never tried anything like mount -t cifs //192.168.X.X/mysambashare /mnt/sdcard/mysambashare and then tried to use the phone as a USB storage device ... If I have time to try it, I'll update.

Thanks for the suggestion, but the networked drive must appear as a USB-device to my TV so there's no pc involved. I should have made this clearer and have just added a crude illustration to the question.
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Richard FlamsholtNov 26 '10 at 23:25